Jack Landry

@jacklandry.bsky.social

214 Followers 397 Following

Research Associate at the Jain Family Institute https://jacklandry.github.io/

Abstract of econ article: Both historically and today, much of the support of the elderly by their adult children has taken the form of in-kind transfers that require shared location, such as shared housing. To the extent that Social Security substitutes for these forms of support, it might thereby relax a “location constraint,” with potentially wide-ranging intergenerational effects. Motivated by this fact, we investigate intergenerational effects of Social Security by combining a novel empirical approach—exploiting within-occupation, cross-industry differences in Social Security coverage in the early years of the program—with a dataset linking information on parents to the long-run outcomes of their children. We find that individuals whose parents were more likely to have received Social Security, or received it earlier, were less likely to live in their parents’ location, earned more, and lived in ZIP codes of higher socioeconomic status near the end of their lives. A variety of evidence suggests that migration to better-matched labor markets was a key driver of these gains. The magnitude of the estimates suggests that the impact of government old-age support programs on the labor market outcomes of recipients’ children may be central to their overall welfare effects.